The Bigness of the Modern Pitcher Is Out of Control and I Can No Longer Abide It

Like most people with an MLB.tv account and no serious responsibilities, I spent a large portion of Wednesday afternoon watching the Pirates-Brewers game. This midweek businesspersons’ special featured one of the most hotly anticipated starting pitching matchups of the season so far: Paul Skenes vs. Jacob Misiorowski.

Skenes, as you know, possesses such electrifying talent it became possible for a Pittsburgh Pirate to become one of the most famous ballplayers in the league. Misiorowski is just three starts into his big league career, but already his prodigious fastball velocity has made him a hipster favorite in baseball circles. Skenesian mainstream celebrity is sure to follow.

As a pure pitchers duel, I’ve seen better. Misiorowski struck out eight and allowed only four baserunners over five scoreless innings, but Skenes ran into trouble in the second inning. He allowed four runs and threw 37 pitches in the frame; that last number left him unable to complete five innings for just the third time in 40 career starts. The two previous instances were his first and last appearances of 2024; in both cases, he was on a pitch count, so one could argue that this four-run, four-inning performance was the worst of Skenes’ career.

Which is pretty incredible; this is also only the third time Skenes allowed more than three runs in a major league start. He’s never allowed more than five earned runs in a pitching appearance, at least not in his time as a professional, nor in three seasons in college, nor in the Cape Cod League or in two stints with the collegiate national team. And that’s as far back as I can find stats.

Anyway, even with Skenes getting crushed (by his standards), it was quite the show.

There were 20 pitches in this game clocked at an even 100 mph or faster (19 for Misiorowski, one for Skenes). And because the Brewers brought in Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill in relief of their starter, the heat did not dissipate even a little after Misiorowski’s departure. Here’s the percentage of Milwaukee’s pitches on Wednesday that hit various velocity thresholds.

And don’t scoff at the Brewers having only the 51st-highest percentage of pitches at or over 100 mph; this is out of the entire pitch tracking era, dating back to 2008, postseason included. All told, that’s 51st out of more than 83,000 games. Also, three of those pitches that came in at 96-plus were sliders. You see why people are so excited about Misiorowski.

As impressed as I was with this display of firepower, awe at the future of pitching was not my primary takeaway. No, watching Skenes and Misiorowski do battle made me feel uneasy.

See, these guys are huge. Misiorowski is 6-foot-7, but at least he has the courtesy to be skinny. His best-in-baseball release extension comes from a build I’d compare to an invasive vine. He’s longer than a timeshare presentation, or the moral arc of the universe. Skenes, “only” 6-foot-6, is huge in all dimensions. On paper, he has upwards of 60 pounds on Miz, and his NFL left tackle frame could probably carry even more if he chooses to follow the indestructible dad bod archetype. He looks like someone zoomed in too far on him, like J.R. Richard or Aaron Harang.

This is too big. Both of them. The modern baseball field was designed for Scots-Irish immigrants with bad childhood nutrition and kidney disease. When 5-foot-11 Honus Wagner was the biggest, strongest player in the league. If you told the founding fathers of baseball that one day ballplayers would get so big they couldn’t borrow pants from Dave Bautista… well first of all, I guess you’d have to explain Dave Bautista to Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright. You get my point.

At one point during the broadcast, the announcers (I believe it was the Milwaukee feed, but to be honest I don’t remember which stream I picked) were musing out loud about whether this was the tallest starting pitching matchup in history, or close to it.

A fair question, given the mass and volume of the two protagonists. Skenes and Misiorowski are certainly giants by normal standards, and bigger than most major league pitchers. But things can get even bigger.

There are 11 pitchers in major league history who are listed at 6-foot-9 or taller, and started at least one game. Every single one of them — including Sean Hjelle, who has exactly one start in his career — has faced an opposing starter listed at 6-foot-6 or taller.

(I’ll pause here to express my immense gratitude to Jon Becker, who worked some database magic that saved me an amount of work that would’ve made this post — which is basically a bit — extremely not worth the effort. And on his first day as a full-time FanGraphs employee, no less! Give the man a promotion!)

As general health and nutrition standards have improved, people have gotten bigger. The population base of professional baseball has grown over time, not just as the U.S. has grown, but as the game has spread across the globe over more than a century. And as training standards improved, people who might previously have been considered too tall for baseball have managed to turn into major league-quality ballplayers.

The first 6-foot-7 big league starter was Detroit Tigers hurler Slim Love, which is also the name of my debut R&B record. Love, who debuted in 1913, is one of just nine pre-World War II starting pitchers listed at 6-foot-6 or taller. (Four of them went by Slim; another went by Big Jim. Perhaps baseball nicknames were not quite so inventive back then.)

Some 262 starters listed at 6-foot-6 or taller have debuted since the end of World War II. (Or at least, since the 1946 season.) Of those, 179 pitched into the 21st Century and 66 are still active now.

That means the super-tall guys have had an opportunity to run into each other. Two of the 6-foot-9 pitchers — Jeff Niemann and Mark Hendrickson — faced each other, so that goes over Skenes and Misiorowski by five combined inches, right off the bat. That’s not only the tallest matchup of two starters of the same height; it’s also tied for the tallest matchup of all time.

There’s a 28-way tie for second place, including four matchups between Johnson and Ben McDonald, who’s probably the only person I’ve ever been surprised to learn was only 6-foot-7. He looks way taller. Maybe it’s the flat top.

“Should I run the shortest?” Jon asked after delivering these results. Yes. Obviously.

Our database, with height and weight data, only goes back to 1974. That covers all the tall guys, but obviously misses the good old days, when ballplayers — even pitchers — were consumptive little Hobbits. A Stathead search reveals not one but three 5-foot-4 starters since the founding of the American League in 1901, and some of those guys were pretty good. Bobby Shantz, all of 5-foot-6, won AL MVP in 1952, which is well into the modern era.

But in the past 50 years, Marcus Stroman is the best we’ve got.

If anything, this list illustrates how big modern athletes are. If Jon and I faced off in a major league game, we’d actually be the shortest pair of starters in the database by an inch. Stroman is one of only two active pitchers (along with Yuki Matsui) whose listed height is shorter than 5-foot-9, which is average for an adult American man.

And you know what? Matsui isn’t American; the average adult Japanese man is only 5-foot-7, so the 5-foot-8 Matsui is taller than average when you account for his country of origin.

Having examined the two extremes, there’s only one thing left to do: Look at the best odd couple moments. There are few things on Earth I find funnier than pictures of tall people next to pictures of short people.

In 2017, before an Astros-Yankees game, I was eating lunch in the press dining room with a local writer. His paper’s photographer came up to our table and asked if there was anything specific he wanted a photo of that afternoon.

“If you don’t get anything else,” he said. “Get a picture of Aaron Judge standing next to Jose Altuve.”

It didn’t disappoint.

The top two finishers in the 2017 AL MVP race are separated by 13 inches, which would make them one of the three oddest starting pitcher couples since 1974. If they were pitchers, which, of course, they’re not. But Meyer and Stroman are.

Even with a bit of a renaissance in 6-foot-8-and-taller pitchers, there are only 19 games since 1974 with a starting pitcher height difference of 12 inches or more. And that includes a number of repeats: Two Stroman-Mike Pelfrey matchups, two Randy Johnson-Mike Hampton matchups, two Chris Young-Sonny Gray matchups, and three Johnson-Dennis Springer matchups. Again, you really see the paucity of truly short pitchers coming through here.

I’d be more willing to accept these titans, with their 100-mph fastballs and searing sliders, if they got assigned a short pitcher buddy. The Big Unit faced Tom Gordon once; that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. If we’re going to live in an age of giants, we might as well have some fun with it.